We are two days into the Russian Invasion of Ukraine and several people have reached out to me as they try to make sense out of it all. These are the first battles on the European continent since WWII and everyone is feeling a bit off-balance. I get it. This is not right. It can’t be happening in our lifetime. But it is.
Let me try to expound on a couple of points that I have made to family and friends about what is happening.
First, there is no need to fear for our safety here in the United States. We live in a bubble from the kinds of wars and extreme poverty and despotism that much of the rest of the world labors under. Barring a nuclear missile exchange, there isn’t anything that Russia can do to the United States or to us as US citizens living here.
Second, although we should be concerned, there isn’t much we can do militarily speaking. The United States people have been clamoring for a “peace dividend” since the end of the Cold War in 1989. We have slashed our armed forces and pulled our forces back from stations overseas. The American people have no stomach for large military expenditures during peace. During Desert Shield/Desert Storm (DS/DS), I told my wife that the United States would never again be able to field such a large force as we had in Kuwait and Iraq at that time. Laws had already been passed by Congress to downsize the military forces, including the National Guard and the reserves. When we went to war in Iraq again in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2002, we were merely a shadow of our former force. And it made that war costlier and more deadly for American forces.
Consequently, today we are extremely ill-prepared for this invasion. Russia can get hundreds of thousands of troops and thousands of pieces of weaponry into Ukraine because it sits on Russia’s border. We can no longer project that much power without months or years of building up to it – not even with all of our allies put together. They have been downsizing as well.
Plus, a war in Ukraine is still a war with a formidable power. It would quickly escalate into a World War and there would be millions of casualties, both military and civilian, on both sides. As well as the destruction of a lot of infrastructure.
No, militarily, there isn’t anything anyone can do at this time, and Putin knows that.
So, lets discuss sanctions, eh?
Sanctions deal mostly with trade and financial dealings.
The problem with sanctions is that we will cut off our nose to spite our face. In other words, Western Europe depends on oil and gas exports from Russia and Ukraine. This dependency is deep. There is a lot of infrastructure such as pipelines and refineries from Russia and Ukraine that support this dependency. If we squeeze Russia, they turn around and squeeze twice as hard on Western Europe.
As many of you know, my brother was once in prison in Nevada. The prison guards liked to flex their muscles every now and then. Always with the prisoners. Sometimes with me. At the time, I had friends and high places and I could have easily brought down some heavy crap on the guards that were messing with me. But I knew that stuff flows downhill. And I knew that whatever woe I could bring down on the guards that they would inflict double on my brother.
So I stayed silent and tolerated their behavior.
Plus, sanctions take a long time to take effect.
Plus, we have already had many sanctions in place against Russia because they have been meddling in the Eastern provinces of the Ukraine for about eight years now.
Do they work? To a point.
My last point.
Russia likes to have a cushion between its homeland and the west. We have been stirring the pot on this by putting missiles in countries that border Russia and by putting troops there.
We have also been stirring the pot by dangling the possibility of NATO membership to countries on its border.
What has our Foreign Policy been thinking?!?!?
IMHO we have practically invited Putin to make this move.
That being said, Russia has no interest in having a protracted war in the Ukraine. They also have no interest in destroying all manufacturing and communications infrastructure in the country. They want a functioning country on its borders.
What they want to destroy is the democratically elected government and install a government more conducive to its style of leadership. They want friends to run the Ukraine.
They also want to destroy all military power of Ukraine.
All of it.
They don’t want the possibility of a military menace on its border.
Therefore, I predict that things will end soon.
The current government of the Ukraine will fall and a new one will be put in its place.
All military power will be destroyed.
Ukraine will be under a more autocratic rule.
The people of Ukraine will more or less go back to their lives.
The world will continue to turn.
I don’t like it. You don’t have to like it. It is what it is.
And we here in the United States will go back to our lives – arguing about face masks and vaccinations and such. In ten years, we won’t give much more thought to Ukraine than we give to Belarus or Uzbekistan or any other country bordering on Russia.
Oh yeah, expect this turn of events to embolden China as well.
We’re going to get it from both sides for a very long time.
My two cents.